Endnote 19 – New Testament: The Case of Mary Magdalene
See David Curzon, “A Hidden Genre: Twentieth-Century Midrashic Poetry,” Tikkun 9 (1994), pp. 70–71, 95. For feminist midrash, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Feminist Revision and the Bible (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), and The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994).
See also Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 190, on how Emily Dickinson transformed the common language of biblical metaphor, Christian myth and poetic reference, giving them her own meanings without respect to an “institutional framework of explanation” from Church or traditional theology. Lerner stresses that “women’s autonomy had to be hard-won before creativity could flourish” (p. 179). She describes how women like Dickinson authorized themselves and empowered themselves to think and speak by relying on their own creative talent. “These were the innovators who simply by-passed patriarchal thought and created alternate worlds” (p. 19).